Nis Randers

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Nis Randers is a ballad by Otto Ernst from his volume Voices of Noon - New Seals , published by L. Staackmann in Leipzig in 1901 . The poem, especially known in northern Germany, vividly depicts the dramatic rescue of a shipwrecked man.

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The title hero Nis Randers sees the wreck of a sailing ship stranded “on the sandbank” during a heavy thunderstorm “still a man in the mast” and decides to bring him ashore despite the danger to his life. His mother is desperate to stop him. After her husband and son Momme have perished at sea and their son Uwe has been missing for three years, should she lose the Nis that she has left alone? He points to the wreck: “And his mother?” And sets off with six companions. You survive the storm, and the rescued is none other than the lost Uwe.

shape

The poem consists of twelve stanzas of three verses each.
The first two verses of each stanza, each with four accents, are rhymed with each other. Nine of these 24 verses have ten syllables, six each have eleven or nine syllables and three have only eight syllables. This irregularity corresponds to the drama of the events depicted.
The final verses of the stanzas have mostly six syllables each with two accentuations. There are only five syllables in the sixth stanza, right in the middle of the poem where Nis Randers speaks to his mother:

"And his mother?"

Previous edits of the material

Frida Schanz (1896): In Sturmes Not

In addition to a short story, the material had already been processed into ballads several times before Ernst: in 1895 by Julius Wolff and Reinhold Fuchs, in 1896 by Richard Stecher and Frida Schanz and, at the latest, in 1898 by Felix Dahn . In these, the shipwrecked man is also called Uwe, but his savior is Harro. “Newly added”, reported the journal Internationale Literatur- und Musikberichte in 1899 of an expanded new edition of the collection of poetry Strandgut by Reinhold Fuchs (1858–1938), “is the last man on board , after an incident that happened in 1894 and also from is treated by other poets, admittedly by none as exemplary. ”After Nis Randers appeared in 1901 , this poem was soon overwhelmingly regarded as the most successful arrangement of the subject. " Nis Randers rightly suppressed Dahn's feeble version of the same subject," wrote Albert Soergel in 1911. "A comparison shows quite strikingly the great superiority of Otto Ernst's most haunting essentiality over Wolff's talkativeness, whose story takes four times as long" is what Ernst Borkowsky said in 1925 . Compared to just under 750 words in Wolff and Stecher, 664 in Dahn, 411 in Schanz and 1690 in Fuchs, Ernst suffices for his version 226 words. Accordingly, Nis Randers only needs a wave of his hand and three words to answer his mother.

At Wolff, Harro has a lot more to say:

"Yes, mother, do you know exactly
whether the one on the wreck there, dead tired,
doesn't have a mother at home too? "

At Schanz it is similarly cumbersome:

Harro spoke in a friendly manner: "You remember
That he whom death embraces there, the cold
Even a mother can cry.
I'm going, mother! "

And like first with Fuchs:

But he replied: “Duty calls me!
I follow her, mother; o forgive!
If I fail, it would be shame and ridicule.
O dear mother, thank God,
That I still had something to do!
Stand in the strong protection of the highest
I'm on the sea like here! "-

Ernst - unlike Wolff, Stecher, Schanz and Fuchs - describes the following rescue operation in a kind of wall show, solely from the perspective of those who remained on the beach. There is talk of a “hell dance” of the waves, which threatens to smash the rescuer's boat, which goes out with whizzing oars, until it can no longer be seen from land. The stanzas 9 and 10 only describe the rage of the crashing waves. What happens to the rescuers during this time remains hidden, as with Dahn ( ellipse ). In stanza 11 thunderstorm lightning finally makes "a boat that stops landward" visible, from which the call resounds through darkness and storm, with which the poem ends:

"Says mother, it's Uwe!"

reception

The ballad was printed in 1904 in the magazine for German teaching of the BG Teubner Verlag and in German poetry from the beginning of the classical to the most recent, selected for school use and edited by Ernst Wasserzieher . It was soon taken up in other school reading books and learned by heart by generations of students. Even today it is often part of the curriculum for German lessons. Like Fontane's John Maynard and Schiller's Die Bürgschaft , Ernst's poetry was and is considered to be of educational value not only because of its literary quality and exciting presentation, but also because of the subject of willingness to make sacrifices and the fulfillment of duty.

Achim Reichel set them to music for his album Regenballade in 1978 . The band Engerling worked them into their version of Riders on the Storm on the album Engerling Live (1994). An arrangement by Duo Camillo appeared on their 2010 album Das wird schon wieder .

Klaus Modick's novel “Der Mann im Mast” (1997) is about a writer who remembers Nis Randers on a summer vacation by the sea and speculates about what the rescued Uwe may have experienced during his three years' absence.

The German Maritime Search and Rescue Service In 1990, the rescue boat Nis Randers in service.

Web links

Wikisource: Nis Randers  - Sources and full texts

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ P. 94 ff. In "increased edition (third and fourth thousand)" 1903, archive.org
  2. ↑ E. Jensen: Uwe. Life story . Deutsche Revue, May 1896, pp. 143-151
  3. ↑ Julius Wolff: s: Aus Sturmes Not
  4. ↑ s: Reinhold Fuchs: The last man on board
  5. ↑ s: Richard Stecher: Out of Sturmes Not!
  6. ↑ Frida Schanz: In Sturmes Not , home calendar for the German Reich, Verlag Velhagen & Klasing 1896, page 110 f., Werner's Readings and Recitations No. 19 (1898) p. 53 f. archive.org
  7. ^ Felix Dahn: The Brothers , Poems, Second Volume, Breitkopf und Härtel Leipzig 1898, p. 236 ff. Archive.org ; Collected Works. Volume 5: Poems and Ballads, Leipzig 1912, pp. 433–436 zeno.org
  8. ↑ International literature and music reports , CF Müller Leipzig publishing house 1899, p. 246 books.google
  9. ↑ Albert Soergel: Poetry and poet of the time. A description of the German literature of the last decades. Verlag R. Voigtländer Leipzig 1911, page 365 archive.org
  10. ^ Ernst Borkowsky: New German Poetry from Naturalism to the Present. Verlag Hirt Breslau 1925, p. 63 books.google
  11. ↑ Verlag Schöffling & Co., Frankfurt am Main 1997. Review by Christoph Bartmann in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 25, 1997, No. 170 / page 34, faz.net